


Pieces-Parts

by illa_dixit



Category: Firefly
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Alternate Universe - Unitentionally Kinda Dark, This is funny in places I promise, it all works out at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:09:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2719847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illa_dixit/pseuds/illa_dixit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Firefly role-swap AU. The crew of the Serenity bumbles along through the Verse. It goes mostly okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pieces-Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Wheeee I have like six unfinished things and a bunch of code to write for school but instead I sat down and wrote this collection of perspectives from an alternate universe where things happened differently, people did different things, and ended up different places (although they ultimately end up right where they belong).  
> I have a surprising number of feelings about this, and a truly embrassing amount of backstory that I didn't throw in, becuase it's supposed to be snapshots, but feel free to ask for expansion on anything! (Just don't expect it in fic form I actually do have to write those programs)

 

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

                                                                                                                                       -Oscar Wilde

 

* * *

 

1.

“Captain?”

Kaylee’s voice over the intercom is different than Kaylee’s voice in person, Inara reflects as she flicks the switch that will allow her to answer. In person, she’s confident and bubbly, prone to long tangents about the physics behind firearms. On the intercom, though, there’s always something about her that sounds hesitant, like she doesn’t trust the wires to get through.

“Yes, Kaylee?” She asks, hoping for some good news. They’ve been in a spell of bad luck, and they really do need some paying passengers if they’re going to make it through the next month, much less get that part that Zoe’s been on about for the last two weeks.

Not that Zoe ever “goes on” about something so much as she pointedly mentions it once, and then again if she thinks you’ve forgotten, before getting back to being terrifyingly efficient, but Inara got the message. Literally. No one does paperwork on this ship, so finding an official request means that it’s probably serious.

It is good news. “Got a couple a’ passengers, payin’ proper like. Just…”

Kaylee sounds hesitant, and Inara generally trusts Kaylee’s judgment – it’s kept her from ending up with some extra holes more times than she really cares to count.

“What’s wrong, then?”

“It’s just… Captain, the girl’s got this box. And it just don’t sit right.”

“All right, Kaylee, I’ll be right there.” Inara says, and flicks the switch again. She gives the bridge a quick glance-over to make sure everything is in place (Mal and Zoe would never forgive her if it turned out she overlooked something that might be a problem later, Captain or no), checks the gun at her hip, and walks down to inspect Kaylee’s mysterious box.

With luck, Kaylee’s gut will be wrong, and they’ll get their passengers (and their pay). Wash is due back with the shuttle in a few hours, right about when Book, Zoe and Mal should get back from shopping, and then they can get off this overcrowded rock and back into the black.

They haven’t had any luck at all, recently, but Inara sees no reason to take that to heart.

Approaching the door, she squares her shoulders, pastes on her most disarming smile, and goes to make her own luck.

* * *

2.

Book did not sign up for this.

Well, no one did, to be honest. Inara, fire in her eyes and dreams of flying in her heart, had gotten them one by one, picking them up out of the dirt and giving them the sky. She was beauty and grace, perfect broad smiles and a delicate finger on a trigger. She had promised nothing but a place to belong.

“Belonging” involved an awful lot of petty theft, something that Mal teased her for, when he thought he could get away with it and wasn’t too busy pulling evasive maneuvers  that should have been impossible in space, much less in atmo. But it kept them flying, their ship a bright spot of warmth in the black.

He thought he’d been getting into a pretty standard job, serving as Inara’s backup in basically everything, keeping track of what the ship had and what it needed… Book could handle that. He was good at it, good at smoothing over ruffled feathers and standing behind Inara looking threatening while she dealt with the less savory side of society.

What Book was not sure he could handle was the impending heart attack their new passengers were certain to give him, one of these days.

The Shepard wasn’t so bad. Rough around the edges, yes, but not so bad. Jayne, Book thought, was certainly a man who’d seen some terrible things indeed to decide to be a Shepard. He was, at least, relatively straightforward, despite his tightly closed lips on subjects like “the past” and “the future.”

But the Tam siblings… That was a whole different problem.

After the nasty whole business with the alliance mole and Inara getting into an absurdly polite fight of words with River (culminating in a series of increasingly obscure references to ancient poetry, and resulting in something like acceptance), Simon had been properly introduced to the crew.

It had not gone well.

The boy in the box, River’s older brother, was clearly not all there. He hadn’t met any of their eyes, instead staring fixedly at the air directly above everyone’s head, completely silent until Mal stepped forward to introduce himself, gloved hand outstretched. Then, he’d flinched away hard enough that it looked to be physically painful, shoulders coming up and head going down, trying to make himself smaller and hide behind River.

It had been a portrait of tragedy, but it had been touched with just a bit of comedy, the much-taller big brother huddled behind his tiny slip of a sister. That is, until the screaming started.

So, now that Simon is sleeping the sleep of the drugged (again) in the bunk he’s sharing with River, Book is showing River around the sickbay, which is to be her new domain.

“I’m only sorry we don’t have better equipment to offer you.” Book says, for something to fill the silence with. He’s not normally one to be bothered by silence – it can be hard to find, even out in the black – but there’s something about the way that River is quietly and efficiently studying everything which unnerves him, a little.

She shrugs, an elegant little motion, and pokes through a drawer full of sterilized, sealed scalpels. “I’ve done more with less.”

Her tiny hands run over the equipment, fingers tapping twice when they find a flaw, and he can practically see the gears spinning in her head, filing everything away. Book has no doubt that by supper-time, she’ll know where everything is by heart.

“Still. It will be good to have a doctor.”

It seems to be the wrong thing to stay. Her hands still on a cabinet door, and she stares fixedly at the handle and smiles, bittersweet.

“Simon is… Simon was better than me. I never got a feel for people, not the way he did. I know how it works, but I don’t understand why it keeps going. Just how to make it do that, usually. I like people better on an operating table, or through the pages of literature. He always knew how to deal with them to their face.”

This is patently no longer true, and Book holds his tongue, allows her the moment.

River had patched Mal up, moving instinctively to stop the blood flowing from his shoulder when the Alliance mole had gotten too close too fast with a knife. She’d dealt with it efficiently and with minimal fuss, but there had been no worry in her eyes, no care for the man whose blood was leaking through her fingers.

Only concentration, as she sewed him up and sealed the wound and then carefully disinfected everything in the area.

Book believes her, that she doesn’t really get people face-to-face, and he wishes he knew the Simon she remembers. But any doctor is better than no doctor, and River is still clearly very good at it.

He leaves her to her memories, closing the door gently behind him.

* * *

 

3.

Jayne’s never liked people much. Surprisingly, becoming a Shepard had helped with that.

Not in the “loving everyone” way that most people would expect, of course. More in the “sitting alone where no one bothers me is great” way. It had suited him, for a time.

If he hadn’t had other, more pressing, things to contend with, he might even have stayed there. Instead, he’s holed up in the hold (ha) doing sit ups and trying to ignore the ball of sunshine who’s just entered.

It’s not that Kaylee is the _most_ gratingly annoying person on this gorram ship, but she is pretty close. And he wasn’t exactly looking for company, what with being in the hold, where it smells funny and the chill of space somehow seems to seep in, just enough to make hanging around uncomfortable. He braces himself for conversation he has no interest in making, but she just waves and gives him a cheerful smile before grabbing hold of the railing and flipping herself neatly over, so that she’s hanging from the walkway by her fingertips.

He watches, a little bemused, his rep count forgotten, as she does a series of increasingly complicated pull-ups, before flipping around to lock her knees around a support and do sit-ups in midair.

Girly-girl might not be so bad, he thinks, remembering the way she’d handled her well-cared for pistol when she and the Captain were conning the Alliance mole.

Of course, that’s when Kaylee dropped down to the floor of the hold and offered to spot him with the weights, and then proceeded to not cease her yabbering for a solid hour.

It could be worse, though, Jayne though. At least she knew her guns.

* * *

4.

“Zoe!” The angry shout lost some of its effect when it came through an intercom, and didn’t have the noisy chaos of a war in the background, Zoe thought. Mal still had a set of lungs on him, though, so it wasn’t like she could pretend not to hear him.

“Yeah, Sarge?” She asks, once she’s contorted herself enough to reach the switch for the intercom in the engine room without disturbing the pieces spread neatly over the floor.

Zoe is a woman who appreciates order, the way that all the little pieces come together to make the whole work. It is because she understands the pieces and the whole that she can cobble together a functioning back-up life support system from what should rightfully be so much rusted scrap. There is beauty here.

Mal is not a man who appreciates this beauty, particularly not when it causes the _Serenity_ to drift to starboard, and he informs her of this, though not in so many words. There is much more shouting, and an awful lot of words that Zoe vaguely and habitually hopes that Kaylee doesn’t hear, despite having heard the girl say worse. It’s loud and unconventional and creative and just like Mal. It would even be effective, if Zoe didn’t know that it would clear up in an hour when she’d recalibrated everything and tuned the engine.

Pulling to starboard was, in the grand scheme of things, not all that important when it came to things like oxygen, in Zoe’s humble opinion.

She wasn’t about to tell Mal that, of course. The poor man had been stabbed, again, only a few days ago, and he was touchy about the ship at the best of times. If Zoe were another mechanic, she might even consider being offended.

But they’d been through the War, she and Mal, and she knew that underneath the scolding there was a worry, a fierce desire to keep them all safe.

It was one they shared, it was why they kept this ship afloat in the black. Their squad had survived Serenity Valley because Zoe had managed to repair and start an Alliance ship, and Mal had managed to get it out of atmo relatively unscathed. As long as they’re still flying, they still have control, and they can keep their crew safe. Inara might be Captain, and they’ll defer to her decision (it helps that she makes good decisions) but between the lines they’ll do anything to keep the family they’ve managed to scrape together safe and sound.

So Zoe lets Mal be tetchy about the ship pulling left and makes sure they’ll have gravity and breathable air even if something smashes primary _and_ auxiliary life support. She puts things neatly back into their place and smoothly interrupts Mal’s diatribe on the state of the steering system.

“Think you’ll find she flies fine, Sarge.”

There is a pointed silence, and then Mal’s voice filters back over the intercom, a little bit static-y but back to his usual pointed calm. “ _Shi ma_? So stop messin’ with it.”

“Never,” Zoe says, but lets the smile on her face flow into her voice, and huffs out a small laugh as the connection clicks off.

She stands, rubs idly at the small of her back, which has started to cramp up from twisting herself into increasingly ludicrous positions in order to get everything where it belonged. She wanders off to find lunch, as she suspects that she’s missed the actual meal-time by several hours, and wonders if she can convince Wash to give her a massage.

* * *

5.

Kaylee’s always cleaned her guns at the kitchen table. It’s not that she doesn’t get that some people see it as being impolite, but tables are for spreading stuff out on, and guns have a lot of bits to spread out, and the table in the kitchen is the biggest, so. It just makes _sense._

She’s reconsidering her position, though, because she’s not sure she’s comfortable with the way their new doctor’s crazy brother has taken to sitting across from her and watching her work.

Simon isn’t doing any harm, just staring fixedly at her hands as she disassembles the guns, cleaning each piece before putting them back together efficiently. He tilts his head, sometimes, like he’s seen something fascinating and is committing it to memory for use some other time.

She might be more unnerved if she hadn’t seen him do the same thing to everyone else on the crew except for his sister. He watches their hands as they go about their mundane tasks: the way Wash stirs soup, how Mal and Zoe mess around with the wiring in the bridge until the screens are less fuzzy, the calm clean motions Book uses when sweeping the common area. He doesn’t meet their eyes, and rarely talks – when he does, it doesn’t seem to mean anything, not matter how frustrated he gets.

She’d known a boy, on her home planet, before everything went to shit, who’d been a little like that. Absorbed in his own world. Unable to get his words out, until he was mostly crying and whoever was trying to take care of him that particular week was halfway to a meltdown trying to guess at what he wanted.

Simon wasn’t really the same, though. He knew the words – plenty of big ones, too, that Kaylee didn’t understand – but he didn’t seem to be able to string them together in ways that meant anything.

Kaylee’s seen the way he screams at the air, sometimes. The way he curls in on himself, clutches at his own wrists. She’s watched as he’s lashed out and destroyed things, crying and only stilling when River ducks through his longer limbs and grabs his head and meets his eyes and whispers to him in a language that seems to be all their own.

She doesn’t get it, to be honest. Simon’s broken, and even if he’s been getting better about the ship and the crew, he’s still stone-cold crazy and they’re never quite sure what will set him off.

But that doesn’t meant that she can’t try, and Kaylee will be damned before she lets him slip away without a word, because sometimes she thinks she can see the ghost of a shy, charming young man – the man he most have been before the Alliance took so many pieces away, somehow.

So she offers him a smile, even though he’s not looking at her face, and asks, “What’s got you so fascinated?” without really expecting an answer.

He pulls a face, eyebrows knitting together in concentration, and then he reaches out finger to trace down her hand. “Scaphoid, lunate, carpals to phalanges, flexor tendons and digital arteries and so so many nerves. So many pieces, but it’s whole. It does things, makes things – better, whole, repaired.”

Simon picks her hand up, turns it over in his, apparently fascinated, and Kaylee hardly dares to breathe. He holds their hands up to each other, flexing his own fingers and watching sadly.

“Fixed things, once. But it doesn’t work anymore, it’s not a real boy.”

He meets her eyes for the first time, and she actually _does_ forget that air is a thing that humans require, just for a moment, lost in the swirling tragedy that lies behind blue depths. Kaylee wishes she’d never heard the phrase ‘eyes are the doorway to the soul’ because she can’t imagine what must have happened in his head.

“It’s not real,” he insists, tightening his grip on her hand, eyes shining fierce with the desire to make her understand, and Kaylee just squeezes back.

“Doesn’t have to be real to be wonderful.” She tells him, quietly, and then gently extracts her fingers. She keeps an eye on him, on the pieces of the gun, as she moves across the room and grabs what she’s looking for, but Simon seems to have exhausted his emotions for the day and is back to blank staring.

Kaylee returns to the table, and sets the ball of bright orange yarn and the crochet hook on the table. “Give me a minute to finish this, _dohn-ma_?” She asks, and he nods, pokes at the soft synthetic strands in front of him.

She finishes cleaning the gun, locks it safely away in its case, and then switches chairs so she’s sitting beside him instead of across.

“Look, maybe instead of trying to get the old to work we should try something new.”

(Mal wanders in an hour or so later, takes in the scene – yarn everywhere, Kaylee laughing, and Simon looking fascinated by the mess that’s taking form in his hands – and turns right back around. He’d tell River, but he’s not sure she’ll believe him.)

* * *

6.

Wash has been with the crew longer than Shepard Cobb or the new doctor River and her _feng le_ brother, but he’s always kept to the edges. Partly it’s that he feels better having his own space – the terms of his rental of the shuttle with Inara were carefully constructed on both sides, and as long has he pays rent the shuttle is, for all intents and purposes, his territory – and partly it’s the nature of being a companion. His job is to be friendly and welcoming and lovely, but that doesn’t mean he’s particularly good at it when he’s not putting on a show.

Fortunately, over the years he’s figured out that the rest of the crew is somehow just as charmed by his smart-mouthed clumsiness as they are by his carefully constructed smile, so he’s gotten better at letting down his walls.

He still hasn’t figured out how to interact with the mechanic, though. Not properly.

Which is unfortunate, because right now, Zoe herself is elbows deep in the core of his shuttle, occasionally cursing softly as she neatly settles the screws she’s removing into a small bowl, so that they won’t roll away and become lost forever.

“Can I, I don’t know, offer you some tea or something?” Wash asks, sitting on his hands so he doesn’t give into the urge to run them through his hair.

Zoe surfaces from the engine, cheek smudged with grease, and smiles at him indulgently. “You can offer, sure, but I need both of my hands at the moment so I’m going to have to turn you down until I’m done with this.”

“Right,” says Wash, feeling awkward in his own skin in a way he never does when he takes a client. He knows how to deal with that, but this… He thinks he might actually _like_ Zoe, and that’s, well, it’s pretty well uncharted territory for him.

He doesn’t have the same sort of sob story that many companions have, but he supposes it’s bad enough in its own way. He looks around at the crew, sometimes, and considers just how lucky he is to have them, how lucky he is that they made it through their own horrors and came here, mostly unbroken (or at least, put back together). Zoe and Mal had confused him at first, the way they seemed to orbit around each other hinting at something more, but he’d realized eventually that their easy camaraderie was more phileo than eros, a result of spending an awful lot of time being shot at together. They suited their positions on the ship, Wash thought. Zoe was careful and precise and never let anything slip her mind; Mal was a ball of prickly sarcasm and tension half the time and focused expert piloting the rest of it.

It helped, too, Mal’s prickle making up for Inara’s calm when, sometimes, they needed someone to get angry in order to go forward.

They sit in silence while Zoe works, and after a while it becomes… magically not-awkward. And when Zoe finishes her repairs he makes her tea, and says something stupid, and then she _laughs_ and it’s beautiful.

Wash wishes he were better at this sort of thing, but from the look Zoe is giving him as he offers to work the soreness she’s mentioned out of her shoulders, he thinks he might be doing all right.

* * *

7.

Things are getting better, River thinks, although she can’t tell if she only thinks they’re getting better because there wasn’t really a whole lot of ways that they could have gone worse. The Alliance isn’t on their tail directly, and they even managed to sneak Simon into a core-world hospital so that she could use a 3D neuro-imager to try and figure out just what had been done to the inside of his head, and how to fix it.

The good news was that she now had a rough idea of what those _gao tsao de_ purple-bellies had done to her big brother when they’d taken him away. The bad news was that she now had a rough idea of what the Alliance had done to Simon’s head, and there was no way to fix it permanently.

Sure, the meds seemed to be helping. So did being on the _Serenity_ , surrounded by people who _weren’t_ interested in messing around with his brains and were reasonably invested in him as a person. But there were pieces missing, new things put in, and no matter how good she was, River couldn’t fix it all.

_If it were the other way around_ , she sometimes catches herself thinking, and then has to stop immediately because she knows she can be hard to deal with now, ostensibly perfectly sane, and would not wish her scrambled self on Simon, no matter how good a doctor he had been.

She’s in the common room, making tea and keeping half an eye on Simon, who laughed last week at something Book had said, is sitting making monstrosities out of the yarn Kaylee provides him. He’s adept enough at crochet, it turns out, and it seems to help, but he’s more interested in finding out what he can do with the series of knots that makes up crochet and less interested in sticking to a pattern, so thus far he hasn’t turned out anything that resembles a textile.

Inara comes in, and accepts the cup of tea which River silently offers her with grace. It’s become something of a ritual of theirs, a quiet moment before the preparations for dinner are started where they can pretend that nothing in their lives is going wrong.

Today, though, Inara looks sharply from her to Simon and back, and asks – quietly enough that no one else would hear them – “Would you tell me about him, from before?”

River raises her mug to her lips and sips at her tea, to stall. She’s tried not to dwell on the Simon-from-before, because it only makes it harder to accept the Simon that she has now. But, she supposes that it’s important to recognize what is lost, and maybe opening up will lend some perspective on just how much she hates the Academy and what they’ve done to her brother.

So, somewhat to her surprise, she finds herself talking.

She tells Inara about the secret language they had as children. How they were both so, so bright, and how it was hard for her to interact with everyone else as a consequence. How her brother had been her go-between with the world, sussing out how people worked and translating it flawlessly into River-ese. How Simon knew everything he needed to graduate even before he got into medical school, at 15. How he was going to be the youngest, the brightest star in the Tam family, while she dreamed of being a dancer, of studying physics and understanding the mathematics of the universe.

How the Academy had won her brother over with promises of knowledge and opportunity. How their parents hadn’t listened when she insisted that things were wrong, that Simon wouldn’t write nonsense unless it _wasn’t nonsense._

“It was a code,” she tells Inara, looking firmly down at her tea. “And all it said was, ‘they’re hurting us.’”

She doesn’t need to repeat the bits about how she sold everything she could, pulled every string she could find, to get her brother back. How it took years anyway, and he came back broken, and so she took him and ran.

Inara listens, and does not proffer sympathy or empathy or any of the things that River has come to fear will be handed to her. It’s surprisingly nice.

The Captain is a singular woman, it has to be said. She moves with cat-like grace, wears clothing that is both elegant and capable of taking a beating, smiles like a diplomat and fights like a caged tiger. Inara is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but it is clear that she loves her crew and will do anything to keep them here, with her, safe.

Until today, River has not really felt like she and Simon fell under that protective umbrella.

Now, she realizes, it has always been there – it’s only now that they’ve started to need it in more than the most basic of ways.

It’s strange, but a good strange, and River smiles tentatively across at the older woman.

Simon ends up ruining the moment by playfully knocking her chair out from under her, but it’s such a big-brother move that River can’t find it in herself to be upset at all. Inara smiles as they chase each other around the kitchen, and finishes her tea.

* * *

8.

The love song of Wash and Zoe would be adorable if it weren’t quite so gorram awkward and Mal was not the primary confidant for one side of it.

He got it. Sort of. Kind of. Zoe liked Wash, and Wash was clueless of this fact. Zoe was pretty sure that Wash liked Zoe, but she was too gorram stubborn or something to do anything proactive about it.

Okay, he didn’t really get it.

Instead, he put up with Zoe’s secret pining and watched Wash make eyes at her across the room, and pointedly Did Not Get Involved. Because getting involved meant that Zoe would have free license to tease him about the Captain, and he wasn’t feeling real ready to examine his feelings, thanks.

This was bearable, up until the point where Mal became distantly aware of the awkward puppy-love that Kaylee and Simon seemed to be tipping into. Mal was thankful that there was enough spare good sense left in the Verse for Kaylee to do _absolutely nothing_ about it.

Kaylee’d had a hard time of it, Mal knew, but some things were just too far, and crazy boys were one of them. Besides, even if they all knew Kaylee wasn’t innocent by any stretch of the word or the imagination, there was still something about her that shone, and they all wanted it to stay there.

But, Mal decided, two awkward ship-board romances were certainly more than enough, which left him with two choices: deny everything, or finally go talk to Inara.

Book, Jayne, and Kaylee passed through the room, having what seemed to be a spirited discussion about the virtues various compositions of gunpowder (Mal didn’t really care, so long as the bullet went where he was aiming it) at the same time as Inara wandered in to ask him something about their ETA to the next planet.

Kaylee and Book both shot him knowing looks, and Mal instantly decided on the perfect plan of action.

‘Deny everything’ it was going to have to be.

* * *

9.

Colors, textures, smells, tastes. Usually trustworthy.

Sounds, often not. Too risky to ignore, though, so take the good and the bad and stay out of the heads and away from the eyes.

Pieces, parts, all jumbled. Whole, once, but he can’t remember, he can’t make them do the things they used to do so easily.

Not ship. Rocks, sky, scrub grass. “Dirtside” says Mal sad-happy-breathes-deep-isn’t-home. There are cows. They weren’t cows on the ship, but now there is sky, and they can remember. They are cows.

There are men, there is Inara anger-smooth-silk-danger-words-smiles-protect, there are angry words and a gun.

Blood, from Mal. Again. (Not his fault? This time, maybe.) A different gun, Kaylee sunshine-gunoil-don’t-think-just-react.

He should be helping? He could have helped once.

No, not now. Now there are just pieces, distal phalanges up to a healed radial hairline fracture. Doesn’t work, not whole. There are muscles and tendons and nerves and the flesh is willing but the mind is.

The mind is.

The mind is scattered bits, should be _here_ can’t be.

The pieces don’t make a real boy anymore.

Reaches out, digits stretching. Life seeps out, stop the flow keep the life. Pressure-pressure-pressure, need to take the pieces out which don’t belong before you can stitch everything back together but that only works here, doesn’t work for unreal boys.

Salt, water, blurs. Tears? Still _sees_ , still _hears_ too-much-not-enough what is real? He isn’t.

Crisis sorted, cows gone home. They are home, too, all of them, in the black. River shining-little-sister-worried-calm fixes Mal pain-frustration-why-is-it-always-gorram-me.

He doesn’t hide. Just goes away, for a time. _Serenity_ has open arms and a warm space just for him. Mal pretends-annoyance-doesn’t-mind him beneath the helm-heart-blood, so he stays.

She finds him, her hands whole-pieces-together washed clean. Puts her arms around his broken pieces and tucks herself in with him, like when they were small. Played at soldiers-spies-things-the-future-shouldn’t-have-held.

_“Mei-mei”_ he says, says, says, cries. Tears again. Why won’t it work like a real boy?

“You did good, _da-ghuh_.” Pride-sadness-I-miss-you-come-back.

He’s lost. Neverland, not for real boys, not for coming back.

He’s here. _Mei-mei_ needs him, they need each other.

He’s here.

It will be enough.

* * *

10.

_Serenity_ drifts through the black. There are so many pieces, component parts that require maintenance and care and sometimes replacement.

There are bigger pieces, of souls. Heart of the ship, heart of the crew. Hers has grown, has solidified. Love, light, safety. She carries them through space, and in return their love feeds her. The Mechanic who keeps her purring, the Pilot who keeps her life fun. A Doctor to heal them, a Gunwoman to save them, a Shepard to watch the flock. The First Mate who gets it all done, the Wonder to bring them all home.

The Captain who’s dreams are of stars.

The verse is large, but she will take her crew wherever they wish to go. Wherever their dreams and wants and wishes and needs lead them. She will care for them, and they for her. She is freedom and family.

The stars are theirs.

**Author's Note:**

> IN CASE YOU ARE UNSURE:  
> Inara = captain  
> Book = first mate  
> Mal = pilot  
> Zoe = mechanic  
> Wash = "ambassador" (companion)  
> Kaylee = hired gun  
> Jayne = shepard  
> River = doctor  
> Simon = crazy


End file.
